Twilight Perfected Chapter Seven: Rise from your grief before it grows into your bane
The train rolled on, trading fire for decay as it left the disaster-stricken streets of Sector One for the more generally dilapidated ones of Lower Midgar.
Just like on the ride to the reactor, Sephiroth and Barret had the train car entirely to themselves.
Barret cleared his throat awkwardly.
"You… uh, you did good work."
Sephiroth's only response was a sullen stare.
He honestly wouldn't know what "good work" felt like. He hadn't been doing "good work" when he'd been serving Shinra, and in the wake of that catastrophe, his first mission for Avalanche hadn't felt much better.
"This is just the first step, though; there are seven more reactors..." Barret began.
"Seven more reactors that need to be destroyed to stop Shinra, to save the Planet. To keep everyone alive today, and everyone who came before them from getting turned into mako power." Sephiroth finished for him.
He wasn't in a mood to talk… but also didn't plan on severing his ties to Avalanche any time soon. Shinra had to be stopped; protecting the future of the Planet was all the logical reason he could ever ask for, and as for emotional reasons….
His mother. His mother. His mother….
Sephiroth wished that he could vent his outrage in bursts of incandescent fury like Barret did. He wished he could seek catharsis in surrendering himself to his hatred of Shinra. It would certainly be easier… but he knew whose voice whispered in the lure of the flames, knew the only place that road led to.
More fire, more senseless destruction, hell unleashed on a world too fragile to weather it.
Sephiroth could live with himself as a blade; he would not allow himself to become a bomb.
It was far safer, far more practical, for him to be cold. Any time spent either coddling or venting anguish was far better used ensuring the next demolition went off without a hitch.
Should he destroy the mako pump himself, remove all variables but his own raw power? It was within his abilities, he was certain… but would still prove taxing, and would require him to be physically present the entire time. Feasible, but not ideal…
Should he convince Barret to let him work alongside whoever made Avalanche's explosives? Sephiroth had never been directly trained in demolitions, but he was a very fast learner, and another pair of eyes might catch something the original bomb-maker had missed...
Did he need to find a way to get his hands on some of Shinra's most recent reactor blueprints? Was there something about their design that made them inherently unstable? That could explain how such a small bomb could trigger something so cataclysmic…
"I already contacted Jessie, she upgraded your ID." Barret interrupted his train of thought as the compartment flashed red with the light of a Shinra security scan.
Sephiroth didn't bother to reply. He'd already assumed that was the case; why would Avalanche's leader risk sharing a train car with someone who the scanners would flag as a criminal?
"You're part of Avalanche now, you and your brother. We look out for each other; that means I'm gonna find you a place to call your own and put some gil in your pocket for the work you did."
"Don't spend too much time looking. We'll both be fine sleeping in in the basement."
All of them had more important things to worry about than apartment shopping. Besides, after spending so much time on the front lines of the Wutain War; Sephiroth had refined the nebulous art of sleeping into a precise science. He could sleep anywhere that wasn't actively on fire, and probably some places that were.
It was not exactly his proudest victory, but once, after a truly heroic amount of pleading, Zack had managed to convince Sephiroth to take part in Shinra's unofficial annual inter-office SOLDIERs versus Turks "Olympic" games. Rather than compete in some sort of "sensible" event that would make use of his abilities; like free-running or eating month-old Wutain food, Zack had insisted that he'd needed his commander to be a true ringer.
If SOLDIER were going to win the games for once, then he needed Sephiroth to prove that he was the only man on the Planet capable of "out napping" Reno by falling asleep faster in a more awkward place, to be confirmed by heart monitor.
The judges had given him the gold for managing to doze off inside an active refrigerator in only two minutes, beating out his opponent's feat of drifting off atop President Shinra's desk in five minutes. Sephiroth had privately conceded that Reno had certainly chosen a more hazardous place to sleep, but that hadn't been one of the criteria being judged…
At any rate, based on the conditions Kadaj had been kept in, he probably wouldn't make much of a fuss over having little more than a hard floor and a pillow to call his own either.
As for money, Sephiroth would take whatever Barret would offer. He already had several million gil sitting in a Shinra account, even if they'd doubtlessly have frozen it by this point, Money had never really mattered to Sephiroth; he had always found more important things to worry about…
XXX XXX XXX
"So, how did your mission with Kadaj go?" Tifa asked Jessie.
Given that they'd left fairly early in the morning and were only now getting back, things couldn't have gone too poorly. On the other hand, since Kadaj had opted to take the "Seventh Heaven Special" down to the basement the moment no one was watching, something must not have gone according to plan.
"He's fun enough to hang around with, and he'll do a lot of good for Avalanche, but he's a puppy. You might play with a puppy, but..." Jessie flashed a saucy grin. "I like my guys with a little bad boy in them."
On the heels of those words, Sephiroth stepped through the front door.
Jessie was instantly on her feet, eyes alight. Tifa felt an instinctive surge of sympathetic dread.
"Hello, tall, bright and handsome!" Jessie eagerly greeted Avalanche's other newest member.
General Sephiroth did that thing with his eyes that scared people.
Jessie slunk back to the bar.
"Like I said, a little bad boy." Jessie admitted, before suddenly leaning forward with great intensity.
"Don't suppose you've got a third silver haired guy hidden around here do you?"
Tifa rolled her eyes, again, before confirming that Sephiroth wasn't the only one to have returned from the mission.
"Marlene, your dad's back!" Tifa called towards the back room.
Said back room's door wiggled about for a few moments as its occupant struggled with it, before finally swinging open to allow Marlene Wallace to eagerly race toward her adoptive father's waiting arm.
"Daddy! You're home!" The girl squealed with delight.
"That's right, angel, I am!" Barret declared proudly, scooping the four year old off the ground with a fluid ease born of long practice.
"Have you been a good girl?"
"I helped Tifa wash dishes so I could stay up late and wait for you!"
Every time Tifa saw those two she got a warm feeling in her chest. That girl's past was one of tragedy, but she refused to allow it to define her future. Even having her original family and her home stolen from her hadn't stopped her from finding new ones.
Marlene Wallace was a phoenix, even if she didn't realize it, and witnessing her joy made Tifa long for the day she could truly spread her own fiery wings.
She returned her attention to Sephiroth, whose typical stoicism seemed in this case to cover a blend of conscious aloofness and awkward perplexity.
"They're quite a pair."
"She's... happy." Sephiroth noted; he almost stumbled over the word, as if it was a foreign concept that he understood on an intellectual level, but that continued to elude his intuitive grasp.
Tifa noticed the yellow flower that had been pinned to Sephiroth's outfit, but decided it probably wasn't her place to ask about it.
She was a bartender, not a therapist. Both had to be good listeners, but only the latter asked probing questions.
Luckily, before their awkward attempt at a conversation had to stagger along any further, Kadaj rode the pinball machine up from the basement. He greeted Sephiroth in a manner only slightly less exuberant than Marlene had Barret.
"Seph, it's so great to see that you're back! I mean, I knew that you'd come back, because whatever this mission was, you'd be able to do it no sweat, since you're, you know, you! Still, I mean, I was, well, maybe just a little worried! But you're here, you're back, so I don't need to be worried anymore… what's this?" Kadaj's outpouring of praise and relief only ground to a halt when he noticed the same flower Tifa had.
"Do you mean in general, or in particular?"
Kadaj tilted his head to the side in confusion.
"You've never seen one before?"
Kadaj eagerly nodded in agreement.
Sephiroth sighed, removed the flower from his outfit and attached it to Kadaj's.
"This is a flower, it is the reproductive system that many plants use. They're brightly colored and pleasant smelling because it helps them attract the birds and insects they rely on to spread their genetic material across a wider area. I can explain the process to you in more detail later.
For now just look at it, and know that it's one of the very few flowers I've seen grown in Midgar. Before you ask, Shinra's Mako extraction is the reason there aren't more of them." Sephiroth explained, his previously cold tones mellowing out to merely reserved.
For some reason at almost the exact same moment that Kadaj relaxed and accepted the flower, Tifa felt herself relaxing as well. She'd been right; whatever else he was, Sephiroth was devoted to Avalanche's cause.
"All right, that's enough scowling and sighing. Shinra's done plenty to mess up all of our lives, but if we can't remember how to smile, that's just letting the bastards win!" Insisted Barret as he returned to the bar after putting Marlene to bed.
"Tifa, break out the good stuff; it's time to celebrate! Biggs, Wedge, Jessie, these are Avalanche's two newest members: Sephiroth and Kadaj!"
XXX XXX XXX
In all honesty, Sephiroth could have done without the celebration. To those who didn't have his unyielding convictions, some form of reassurance was probably welcome though.
Avalanche wasn't an army, and its members weren't soldiers. Their morale was probably higher than that of your average Shinra trooper, but it was also most likely a brittle, inflexible thing. Handled poorly, tonight's tainted success could well cripple it to it.
That left him with little choice but to suffer this round of merriment. So he sat there and let the members of Avalanche gawk at him like an attraction in a circus.
He'd try to keep to himself and see what he could learn about his new companions through observation.
For the most part, anyway; the moment Biggs tried to slide the glass of amber red liquid across the table to Kadaj, Sephiroth intervened, passing it right back.
"Kadaj doesn't drink."
"Doesn't everyone drink?" Kadaj asked, looking at his left hand as if surprised that it was empty.
"I'll explain later." Sephiroth promised.
Most SOLDIERS that he'd met wound up with livers so efficient at filtering out toxins that it was impossible for them get drunk. A few, though, saw this as a challenge and decided that the best solution was to simply keep drinking more until they finally achieved the altered state of mind desired.
Kadaj already had a somewhat loose grip on reality; Sephiroth didn't want to see him come completely unmoored.
"More for the rest of us I guess. AVALANCHE!"
"Avalanche." Sephiroth dryly affirmed.
XXX XXX XXX
"Ms Pans..." Reeve glanced from the papers to the brunette who'd been his indispensable secretary since his promotion to department head, "I asked for the final figures..."
"Those are the final figures." She insisted.
Reeve looked at them again.
"Did President Shinra cut the investigation short? These numbers don't make sense."
As he spoke, he quickly brought up a different set of numbers on his computer. He'd designed the newest iteration of mako reactors, doing everything he could to make them safer, but "safer" was not the same as "safe".
He'd also drawn up projections for what to expect if a reactor was destroyed, in either an environmental disaster or deliberate act of sabotage.
Why were his predictions so out of step with reality?
"Loss of life is barely a quarter of my best case projections." Reeve almost felt giddy for a brief moment.
Then he realized that he was feeling happy about the outcome of a disaster that had killed dozens of people and done upwards of a billion gil in damages, and cast his eyes downward in disgrace.
"I've got a long day of work ahead of me..." Reeve winced, wondering just what, if anything, he'd actually be able to do in order to mitigate the still-unfolding tragedy.
Was he supposed to just fill a dump-truck with gil, drive it into the center of Sector One, empty it out on street and let everyone grab whatever they needed?
The sad thing was that "Plan: Dump-Truck Money Dump" would likely still do more net good for the stricken sector than whatever President Shinra would actually end up approving.
XXX XXX XXX
"I'm Marlene." The little girl introduced herself as she awkwardly clambered up onto on a bar stool next to his own.
"I'm Kadaj." Avalanche's youngest member answered with a relaxed smile.
"I'm four!" She added exuberantly, holding up all the fingers of her right hand.
"I'm two." Kadaj replied, displaying the index and middle finger of his left hand.
That was actually being rather generous since Kadaj was, by his own reckoning, roughly two months old. He didn't know much about how most people matured, but he suspected this was not the same scale Marlene was using.
Marlene took a moment to look Kadaj up and down, then squinched up her face much like he did while grappling with an extremely complex issue.
"Why are you so big?" Was the question she eventually settled on.
Kadaj looked over at the pinball machine. Sephiroth had planned to sleep in, today; he was on his own.
"I'm just lucky." Was the best answer he could give.
Marlene though that over for a bit but it seemed she could find no compelling counter argument.
"So you work for my daddy now?"
"Yeah, your dad is an amazing guy..." Kadaj began out of pure instinctual desire not to disappoint a wide eyed young girl.
It sure would have been nice if his brain was willing to meet him halfway and supply a proper end to the sentence, though!
Then he glanced down at the yellow flower and remembered what Sephiroth had told him.
"He really cares about the planet!" Kadaj finished with another smile, feeling quite proud of himself.
Thanks to his superhuman reflexes he'd even managed to figure out his response so fast that Marlene hadn't noticed him pausing to think.
Just like he'd told the young girl, he really was lucky!
XXX XXX XXX
After the lunch rush, it was time for Avalanche to get together and plot their next mission- which meant Sephiroth suddenly had a great deal more company in the hidden basement.
"All right, Avalanche, its time set the wheels in motion for our next major operation against Shinra." Barret called out to the six other members of the group.
"AVALANCHE!" The four who had didn't have silver hair roared in approval.
"Avalanche!" Kadaj's cheer was a moment late, but no less exuberant.
"Avalanche." Sephiroth saw no reason to feign enthusiasm, but still gave the word all the gravity of a solemn oath.
"So, first things first, I'd like to take a moment and thank Wedge; without his help, we might as well be picking numbers out of a hat to figure out which reactor to take down next. Instead, he managed to discover that Shinra is working on some type of new high tech weapon inside the Sector Five Reactor. Whatever it is, this thing is so mako thirsty that they decided to build it someplace where the stuff would be directly on tap... so when we scrap the reactor, that'll not only give Shinra one less straw to suck the planet dry with, but also deprive them of their newest toy!
Jessie, we're gonna need five train passes for this mission, and another bomb."
"No sweat! I, um... I've already figured out what I'll do differently on this one, so don't worry about a thing!" She seemed to be trying to convince herself as much as she was the rest of the team.
"Wedge, its your job to guard our home base and look after Marlene. You're the one who'll make sure my baby girl is still here when I get back..." Sephiroth was impressed by the ease with which Barret granted prestige to the mundane, yet necessary task.
No one in army wanted to be responsible for digging latrines, but it had to get done all the same.
"Biggs, you're going to head in early and lay the prepwork. Try to figure out what we're up against or if Shinra expects we're gonna strike again this soon, especially if its against the Sector Five Reactor in particular."
"Tifa, Sephiroth, Kadaj, you three will stick with me; we're gonna be the actual strike team." Barret finished.
"Good." Was Tifa's only response, though Sephiroth noticed she was clenching both of her hands into fists.
XXX XXX XXX
It was 8:45 PM; Barret had promised himself he'd make a decision by 9:00 to ensure the attack would coincide with the reactor's evening shift change. It was getting down to the wire; scrap or go, he had to commit soon.
He still hadn't heard back from Biggs.
He angrily pressed the "reload" key on an otherwise completely mundane email account.
The account still hadn't received any new messages, and if he didn't hear from Biggs soon it might mean Shinra had captured him. On the other hand, it might just mean that his communication equipment had suffered some minor malfunction and waiting would give Shinra time to complete their new weapon. Should he go ahead with the mission and risk the possibility that the rest of Avalanche would be walking right into a trap?
He allowed himself to breathe easily when a "1" popped up in the account's "Drafts" folder, a signal that, in theory, someone else was partway into writing an email.
Barret selected it, opening the message with no recipients and no subject line. Its contents were a single character.
"!".
Barret grabbed his black sunglasses and turned to face the basement's only other occupant.
"Hot damn! Sephiroth, mission is live! Grab your little brother and let's show Shinra what happens when they mess with our Planet!"
Sephiroth was laying on a pile of boxes with his traditional "completely unreadable" expression but in a few moments he was standing by the pinball machine ready for a ride up.
Barret joined him, and started passing out more orders the moment the machine was halfway up.
"Jessie, get the word out on the web, since Shinra refused to shut down their reactors, Avalanche is gonna generously do the job for them." He ordered.
Avalanche's computer specialist shot him a quick salute as she was crouched over the laptop Sephiroth had brought with him, relishing the chance to finally have a top of the line machine to work with.
"Tifa, grab your gloves." He called out to Seventh Heaven's owner.
A dirty rag hit the bar's counter.
The door to the Seventh Heaven's backroom didn't have a chance to stop swinging from its owner's speedy entrance before she exited it, combat gloves adorning her fists.
"Alright, let's get going." Her voice had the grim, purposeful energy of a hunting dog that had finally been let off the leash.
Sephiroth glanced at Kadaj.
"Are you ready to go to work?"
"I came out of the mako tank ready!" Kadaj eagerly vowed, standing up from his seat to take up a flanking position behind Sephiroth.
The four of them headed for the train station with Barret in the lead.
This was the first time Tifa had actually joined Barret on a mission, but that barely mattered; if he could trust her with Marlene, he could definitely trust her with his life!
As for "Sephiroth", at this point it hardly mattered to Barret if he was the genuine article or not. Maybe he was just some random SOLDIER who was putting on a show. Maybe he was just some crazy strong nutjob who simply believed himself to be the legendary general…
Hell, maybe he was the real thing; right now, all Barret cared about was that Sephiroth had proven his commitment to the mission. After his performance in Sector 1, he'd earned himself at least a little trust and respect.
Finally, there was Kadaj.
Even Sephiroth admitted he was untested and even Marlene could tell that he didn't have the eyes of a killer. Who knew how much help he was actually going to be on this mission?
Well, there had been times when Barret had wondered exactly how much good Wedge could do for Avalanche, and if it wasn't for his skills at information gathering then they would never have gotten a chance to nip Shinra's latest mechanical monstrosity in the bud.
Avalanche was rolling, and Shinra was downhill.
End Chapter.
AN: The method of contact Biggs and Barret are using is to the best of my understanding (the purity (by which I meant not drawing the attention of law enforcement agencies) of my search history insists I don't look too deeply into it) is a real world method of contact for clandestine electronic "email", because it is a lot easier for someone watching a system to notice a message that is actively being sent between two different accounts than one that is simply created in a dummy account by one person, and then viewed by a second person with access to that same account on a different machine.